SMS is one of the most important medium of communication today. Most wireless phones come with a standard SMS client along with a simple text based user interface (UI). These SMS clients resemble the command prompt on the PC world.
Due to the huge boom in mobile commerce, various companies are trying to use the SMS medium to generate more revenue by creating customized advertisements, innovative contests for people to participate in, and allowing people to download various multi-media content including music, images, ring tones etc. Access to each of these services requires users who want to participate to remember certain commands to be sent using SMS so that the SMS is interpreted in the desired manner. Users need to remember such commands and also type the messages which is a tedious process specially considering the fact that most mobile phones come with a keypad where each key is linked to three letters or four letters.
With the advancement of technology especially in computing, mobile devices are becoming more and more sophisticated. Today many such devices are able to run operating systems like winCE and Symbian OS that allow custom applications to be built the same way applications are built to be run on a PC. While there exist many such applications, most of these applications require access to Internet Protocol (IP) based communication channels like WAP or GPRS to communicate. And these technologies are not accessible to every mobile user either because a service provider does not provide the facility or accessing networks implementing these technologies means additional cost for the users.
There exists a need to provide the services to mobile phones which do not have IP access with the existing facilities available on the phone. The utilization of SMS as a channel of communication facilitates the user of a mobile phone to access information over the Telecommunication network.